Potty Training, Crawling, Bike Riding & Mayhem

February 11, 2016

It’s been a long while since I’ve written one of these posts, probably because I’m so busy doing mom stuff all of the time that the last thing I want to do in my free time is talk about mom stuff! But there’s been a lot of exciting things going on lately and these are the kinds of memories I know we’ll look back on later with joy.

THE GOOD

Time with my boys! Having my three boys at home with me all day, every day, keeps me busy enough to have no choice but to let go of some of the not so necessary things that I’d normally be doing with my time. Like vacuuming under the dining room table after every single meal (which is endless), mindlessly surfing social media, straightening my hair, and/or sifting through thousands of photos and then not actually doing anything with them, hahaha.

In the past it’s been a struggle to have very little time for art or blogging, but at this point I’m learning to take things easy and enjoy being a stay at home mom without stressing over the lesser things! I’m so thankful for God’s grace in my life and for what He’s teaching me in this very busy season of motherhood.

Silas is POTTY TRAINED! I’ll be honest, we drug out feet big time when it came to getting started, because the prospect of monitoring a two year old all day while also watching a four year old and an eight month old is no fun at all. But a few short trial runs in days leading up to the real thing made it easier to hunker down when the time came.

Thane and I have two different philosophies on potty training. Thane wants to do it in a way that avoids any possible chance of an accident, and I want to do it in a way that teaches them really quickly that your diaper days are over andthis is serious. Otherwise, you may just have the first twenty five year old that’s not potty trained. So, we waited until Thane left town for a week to get down to business and it only took one major accident in public to help Silas figure out that he never wanted to do that again, hahaha. Anyway, let me just say praise God for giving up the patience and gumption to finally get this done! We’re really proud of all of Silas’ progress and it’s so nice to be down to just one child in diapers now!

Finn is- sort of, almost, at the cusp of, but basically– crawling! He’s taken his sweet time (not unlike his big brothers), and he does more scooting, pivoting, inch-worming, and army crawling than actual crawling. But each day he makes a little more progress and I’m sure it won’t be long before I’m wondering why I ever thought he needed to learn this skill, hahaha.

Asher got his first bike! It was an early birthday present (he’s just a week shy of turning five), and boy does he love it!

THE NOT SO GOOD

Potty training. Hahaha! If you keep up with me on Facebook, you’ve probably already heard it so I won’t go into a lot of detail. As explained above, it’s gone very very well overall, but we’ve finally experienced on of those infamous incidents with no.2 getting smeared over every square inch of Silas’ bedroom. And I mean it when I say every square inch. Literally, every square inch. But, a lot of washing, scrubbing, throwing away, and steam vacuuming later, we can (try!) to forget it ever happened.

General mayhem. Here we go with Silas again- he is a mischievous one! Over these past few weeks, he’s stolen the jar of peanut butter twice. The first time he smeared it all over his and Asher’s beds an hour before our Wednesday night small group was going to start (he loves waiting until right before people are coming over to get crazy with something), and the second time he had it on the living room couch, just casually snacking and rubbing it all over the place in the process. He also destroyed a whole roll of toilet paper and he stole the pole we use to open the attic and used it to collect all of the keys off of the tops of the door frames. Why? To try to get into the locked room housing the expensive steam vacuum cleaner that we had to borrow in order to clean his Jackson Pollack inspired no.2 art out of the carpet. No doubt because he wanted to experiment with destroy it.

Sickness. In an attempt to get the boys out of the house and around other kids their age more often, we started going to a play group last week that was a lot of fun but left all of us with a nice cold for the rest of the week. Including Asher throwing up at the PX, poor guy.

I’ll leave it at that for now. What about the rest of you mamas? What has your week in motherhood looked like?